This chart shows the previous jobs of politicians for lawyers, civil servants, professors, and economists. There a number of notable different compositions, but the United States has a clear, comparative lack of professors, Greece has the most economists, The Netherlands has the most academics, and many countries use predominantly civil servants.

Great series of graphs from The Washington Post. They asked their favorite “wonks” what charts or graphs were most meaningful to them in the past year. Chart above shows the Obama-Romney election and how increasing density meant increasing votership for Obama, decreasing for Romney.

Bloomberg with a nice article about the continued increase in prices for higher ed, as well as the increasing rate of student defaults. I believe that someone or some company, very soon, is going to develop an alternative to traditional higher ed that offers a similar education and a similar “signalling” effect to employers of graduates at half the price of traditional higher ed. This will cause havoc in the field of education, like what Toyota and Nissan did to General Motors, Ford and Chrysler in the 70s and 80s.

Not surprising that San Francisco voted overwhelmingly for Obama, although the magnitude for Obama was significant at 83%. I wonder if there are any other cities or counties in America that voted as overwhelmingly for Obama. I also wonder which cities or counties voted most overwhelmingly for Romney.

Also of interest was turnout in San Francisco at 56%, which seems low to me. We are looking into historical turnout nationwide and how it compares to the recent election. Almost half of those who voted in San Francisco did so by mail, which seems like a big number and I’m curious as to how that compares to the past. My sense (unconfirmed) is that vote-by-mail has been increasing, which is unusual given my other suspicion (mostly unconfirmed) that snail mail has been losing share to e-mail in the last 15 years. I think likely that the voters who prefer vote-by-mail to physically going to a polling station would prefer online voting even more so, but online voting is not available.

Among major global industrial nations, the US is projected to have significantly lower production costs than its competitors. According to the Boston Consulting Group study, the US is expected to have a cost advantage over manufactured good exports of 5% to 25%. In addition, the cost gap of producing $1 worth of goods between China and the US is expected to shrink from twelve to 7 cents.

Canada’s initial 2011 census data was released today. Canada’s population increased 5.9% in the past 5 years to 34,482,779. The country’s center of gravity is continuing the slow shift westward–provinces East of Ontario account for 30.6% of the population while those West of Ontario now make up 30.7%. For more information, check out the visual census.